Bibliophilia Obscura

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

For anyone who might think that the paucity of my posting is evidence of a slow reader, well, you’re not wrong. However, I do manage to get through quite a few more books than is evidenced on this lowly site. So, how do I choose what to write about? I have no idea: it usually depends on what else is going on in life, and my inclination to overcome a certain laziness towards non-essential tasks. I recently thought it might be interesting to me to think about what I’ve read in the past 12 months or so, which led to this list. I’ve relied on memory and on notes jotted down in my little, underutilized, reading journal to come up with this list, which only includes what I haven’t already discussed on this blog.

The House of Life by Mario Praz

The Death of Lysanda by Yitzhak Orpaz

D’Annunzio by Philippe Jullian

Haunted Castles: Collected Gothic Stories by Ray Russell

A large portion of Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (interest waned about halfway through, but planning to get back to it…)

Monday, June 05, 2017

In the late 80’s I came across a reprint of an 1896 pseudo-medical text entitled Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. This was a clinically lurid compendium of unfortunate and horrendous tumors, abnormalities, birth defects, and injuries. Some of the stellar personages included poor Phineas Gage (who had a large iron rod shot through his skull as a result of an industrial accident, and lived – one assumes with associated cognitive difficulty – to tell the tale), and Edward Mordrake, the (literally) two- faced individual whose extra visage allegedly tormented him with threats of damnation. There was also the Civil War soldier who became a papa by having a testicle shot clean through, with the projectile coming to rest in the womb of a fortuitously placed virgin. My faulty memory tells me that the two became hitched, and presumably spent many happy hours telling Junior stories of his early accelerated motility.

As entertaining as all of this is, you have to understand that Anomalies was a thick and well-illustrated tome, and the images, page after page, of unfortunately deformed infants - not to mention the cases of elephantiasis of the scrotum – were heart rending and nauseating enough that the volume soon satiated my morbid curiosity and ended up being shoved in some dark corner, before it was banished by means of donation or sale to some thrift shop or second-hand bookseller.

I’ll hazard a guess that most of the colorful characters in Morbid Curiosities have a copy of that esteemed treatise occupying pride of place in some enchanting tableau, amongst the fetal skeletons and serial killer ephemera. I don’t begrudge these collectors their enthusiasms, but as Nietzsche once remarked, if one stares too long into the abyss, the abyss begins to stare back at you. Let us not forget that behind every dead or deformed infant there is, one hopes, at least one broken heart. I’ll admit that I probably meditate upon these misfortunes somewhat more than my fellow-travellers in this vale of tears (and here’s a plug for a couple of my favorite emporia, Uncommon Objects in Austin and Obscura in New York), but I’d have to say that the folks profiled in this book - one of whom is an owner of the aforementioned Obscura - are invested.

What this volume consists of, with ample illustrations, is biographies of various hipster collectors and photos of their treasures (the aforementioned infant skeletons must come cheap, ‘cause there are a hella lot of them). These folks holding court in their bone thrones share insights into their motivations and passions. All of this is fine as far as it goes: I can imagine this circle of enthusiasts passing and signing copies of this work among themselves like some demented high school yearbook. But I’d have to say that, as with Anomalies, a little of this one goes a long way.

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Arabia Felix is
an extraordinary story of endurance on an 18th Century Danish
expedition to the Yemen, known in antiquity as “Arabia Felix”.I noticed recently that New York Review Books
was reprinting this book, and was reminded that I had the 1964 Harper and Row
edition on my shelf.I knew nothing of
this work, but NYRB has a good record of reissuing excellent older titles, so I
thought it would be worth a look.I’m
glad I did, because from the beginning I was pulled into a masterfully told narrative
of exploration, rivalry, hardship and adventure.Hansen tells the story so remarkably that I
hesitate to reveal too much, other than to say that he breathes real life into
the six men who set out to undertake the expedition under the aegis of the King
of Denmark for the purpose of describing the manuscripts, monuments, and
natural history of far southern Arabia.The idea was that in this land, fabled in antiquity for its riches, an
uncorrupted way of life harkening back to biblical times persisted, and that
the discovery of those treasures would bring glory to the Danish kingdom and
important scientific and historical knowledge to Europe.

The undertaking turned into a six year endeavor, the
challenges of which most members of
the expedition rose to heroically.The
success of the endeavor turned doubtful when one of the members, the thoroughly
unlikable von Haven, purchases packages of arsenic in an Istanbul apothecary
shop.This creates a tension that
underlies the expedition for quite some time, until the charms of their destination
(which would soon enough turn sour) envelope them.This country, which contains both scorching
desert and idyllic mountain palaces, holds within it a sickness that will
overtake the expedition and imperil its success.

Thorkild Hansen obviously did painstaking research for this
book, and the genuine feeling of compassion and humanity that runs through it
reveals that it must have been a labor of love.If you enjoy a captivating tale of true adventure, I hope you’ll take a
chance on this one.

Monday, April 24, 2017

Not an
obscure book at all, a consideration of Hungerwithin its late 19th century
context makes clear why it is considered an early modern classic, echoing
through the literature of the century that followed.Knut Hamsun’s novel stands in sharp contrast
to much that had come before: it is a plotless narrative of a destitute
writer’s mental state as he pits his personal vision against the harsh
realities of the outer world.Hunger and
poverty weigh heavily upon him.We don’t
know exactly how he arrived at this state, although there are enough hints
dropped for us to know that it hasn’t been a perpetual situation.

We meet the
author (clearly Hamsun’s surrogate) in the midst of his troubles, but at least
with a roof over his head.He is on the
street soon enough, but holds optimism that a turn of fortune is at hand.He does have a tendency, if not a
determination, to subvert himself – no sooner does he come into a pittance than
he impulsively gives it away, or rejects offered assistance through a misplaced
pride.He is prone to bouts of
self-aggrandizement, alternating with periods of hopeless despair.He further swings between touching
sentimentality and fierce rancor.In the
streets of 21st century America, he would simply be counted among
the homeless mentally ill, but the narrative is sustained by his internal
dialog, and clearly there is a degree of intelligence and self-awareness being
portrayed.

In narrative
terms, the arc of the story is a rather shallow one, and one can’t imagine too
many realistic scenarios (short of violence or death) by which Hamsun could bring the tale to an end, but
there is enough of a narrative to pull the reader forward.It’s considered that this story is largely
autobiographical, with incidents from the author’s own years of desperation.Aside from some unsavory opinions and
associations during the years of Nazi occupation of Norway, I know little of
Hamsun’s life and work.I suppose Hunger serves as a proper introduction,
and I’d be curious to investigate the perspectives of his other writings.

Monday, April 03, 2017

The Ice Trilogy (Bro/Ice/23,000), published by New York Review
Books in 2011, is by turns intriguing and exhausting.The overarching story, of pure celestial essences,
the 23,000 creators of the physical universe, who have become trapped in their own
material creation is, of course, gnostic in its essence (as was Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth), but the
massive (694 pages) length of the combined trilogy and the numbing repetition
of essential actions – which, I suppose, are illustrative of life itself –
serve to dull both the mind and soul.

It is a conspiracy novel par
excellence, as the liberated essences search out and awaken their companions,
entrapped within impermanent human shells, by means of bone-crushing blows to the
sternum with heavy ice hammers. The origin of this curious practice goes back
to a scientific expedition to Siberiato
investigate the site of the Tunguska event. Alexander Snegirev, born June 30,
1908, the son of a wealthy Russian sugar producer whose family had been
scattered and destroyed by the Revolution (the early pages, told as a first
person narrative, carry the dim echo of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory) signs up for the expedition at the urging of a girl
he meets at university.A lost, drifting
sort of youth, Alexander becomes mysteriously invigorated as he approaches the
site.He discovers - or rather is led to
- a huge mass of ice embedded in the swampy permafrost, and undergoes a radical
change when he slams his naked chest into the ice and his true essence
surfaces.As unremitting as any
biological impulse, the ice “speaks” to him, awakening his heart (in the words of the novel), and his humanity falls away.The narrative grows more alien and
single-minded, as the human race becomes more and more inconsequential to the
young man, now known by his true (and unfortunate) name of “Bro”.He sets fire to the expedition encampment before
he sets out, still naked, across the tundra.He eventually finds, out on the desolate steppe, a girl who will share his
mission.After Bro liberates her, she is
known as “Fer” and together they embark on a widening scheme of seeking out, by
psychic means, and building a secret society of liberated beings. As the
society grows, human beings come to be known to them simply as meat machines, to be despised for their gross and perishable natures, hidden from, and manipulated
towards the higher end.

The Brotherhood, in a course of history intertwined with
that of 20th century Russia, grows in numbers, harvests their
brethren (under cover of the Holocaust, at one point), and establish a shady
multinational corporation - again mirroring Tevis - by means of which they
manufacture and deploy the ice hammers, which must be assembled and used under
strictly proscribed procedures. The symbol of the hammer in relation to Soviet Russia cannot be mistaken.

As the
Second World War transitions to the Stalinist twilight, the Kruschev era, and
gradually on to post-Glasnost Russia, the Brotherhood becomes less
discriminating in their methods:blond
and blue-eyed humans, the apparently preferred host for the celestial entities,
are abducted and battered with the ice hammers in the hopes of liberating a few
more of the 23,000.The narrative begins
to focus more on the stories of individual humans, with an emphasis on the
seedy and criminal, as they become awakened to their higher selves.The trappings of the Brotherhood become more
cultish, with expensive surroundings, evoking on one hand the higher echelons
of Scientology and on the other the sordidness of the Jonestown massacre.There is also a growing group of former
victims, seeming paranoiacs who swap stories and piece together a picture of a
vast conspiracy.

As the final ascension, by necessity, must involve each and
every one of the 23,000, there is a frenzy of activity as the magic number is
approached.There are secret Chinese
slave labor facilities manufacturing the hammers from the original Tunguska ice, emphasizing the divide
between the Brotherhood, their accomplices, and the downtrodden workers.One moves towards the end of the book
wondering if the great event will even take place, or if the comforts of power
and wealth, even in the material realm, will be too much of a temptation, but
the organization appears to remain steadfast in its determination to gain
escape velocity and leave the shackles of Earth, their most deficient creation,
behind.

In the end, there are perplexities
remaining.One of the necessary
consequences of the ascension appears not to have occurred, casting doubt on
the reality and effectiveness of the enterprise as a whole.I’d have to say the finale, while unexpected,
is a bit of a letdown after such a long and challenging read.It’s up to the individual reader to determine
if it was worth the effort.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

I first read this novel – Canetti’s sole work of extended
fiction – close to thirty years ago. I put it down perhaps ¾ of the way into it,
turning away, I imagine because of the unremitting bleakness.The outward plot concerns a reclusive and
meticulous scholar, completely absorbed in his studies of the philosophies of
the Orient who, in a spontaneous act of gratitude, marries his scheming and
overbearing housekeeper, who proceeds to make his life (with a degree of
collusion on his part) a living hell.

The scholar, Peter Kien, escapes his apartment after a
particularly bad episode of violence, which allows the story to move on to
present a cast of largely grotesque characters, each entrenched in their own
psychotic realities.Each, in his or her
own way, sees other human beings as objects to exploit or ignore, as the
situation demands.The emaciated,
ascetic Sinologist Kien is a “living skeleton”, becoming more haggard as the
tale moves on.Therese, his housekeeper,
is physically intimidating and abusive towards him.She finds, for a time, in Kien’s absence an
ally in Benedikt Pfaff, the caretaker of Kien’s modest apartment building.He is a red-haired ape of a brute, an
ex-policeman who has already abused his wife and daughter to death, and who
obsessively spies on all who pass or enter the building.He relies on a monthly stipend that Kien had
established some time before in gratitude for chasing off unwanted visitors (Kien’s
acts of gratitude tend to come back to haunt him).Next, there is the hunchback dwarf (it’s
German literature after all) Fischerle, a miserable creature who encounters Kien
after he wanders into a low-life dive.Kien
has, unbeknown to his new wife, who is tearing the apartment apart looking for
his bank book, cashed out his remaining funds and is ill-advisedly carrying it
around in a thick wad in his breast pocket, a fact which does not escape
Fischerle, who, having the wiles of a chess player rather than the strength of
an out-and-out thug, immediately schemes to defraud Kien of his rapidly
dwindling inheritance so that he may emigrate to America and fulfill his
delusion of becoming the world chess grandmaster.A generous cast largely composed of other
misfits and freaks round out the personae
dramatis.

Turned out of his library, Kien is a wispy shell of a man,
catatonic and easily manipulated as the reality of a world outside his library
edges him closer towards madness.Bleak
as the novel is, in the grotesque Germanic tradition that gave us Georg Letham, Steppenwolf, Professor Unrat, and the novels of Paul Leppin, amongst other dark
masterpieces, it is underscored with a cruelly comic quality that I most likely
missed on my first reading, and which might have propelled me towards finishing
it on the first go-round had I been a bit more receptive to it.Kien’s descent is never in doubt, the only
question being when, and by what violent means he will hit bottom.There exists, however, another character, a
potential savior armed with psychological insight who just might salvage - if not
redeem- Kien’s existence.One must,
however, read the novel to assess the success of that venture.

My old Penguin Modern Classics edition (published 1965) uses
C.V. Wedgwood’s 1946 translation, as does my 1984 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
edition.Among his other works, I would
highly recommend his 1960 study, Crowds
and Power.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been a perennial
favorite of mine since I discovered the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Labyrinths in the late 1970’s,
sometime after another fantastic and comforting book, the Bhagavad Gita, came into my youthful possession. Among my most cherished and frequently
consulted books are my first editions of the three large volumes of Borges’s selected
fiction, non-fiction, and poetry published by Viking in 1998 and 1999. While these are somewhat comprehensive, and
collect all the most essential writings (although The Book of Imaginary Beings, alas, is missing), I still have a
number of volumes of his works that predate this admirable effort. In addition, I have other rather ancillary
works by and about Borges. This
collection of talks given by Borges over seven consecutive nights in 1977 is
one of these, and covers most of the author’s deepest preoccupations, from Dante’s
Divina Commedia to the 1001 Nights,
the Kabbalah, Buddhism, Nightmares, Poetry and Blindness. It’s a short volume, and I have picked it up
a few times over the years to read one of the lectures, only to find myself
reading the whole thing through again.
My edition is the Faber and Faber edition of 1984; New Directions
has an edition currently in print.

The metaphysics of these topics preoccupied Borges, and each is in some
way a mask of infinity, as are mirrors, labyrinths, and libraries, three other
preoccupations that he had failed to exhaust in his other writings but did not
address here (at least not directly, though references to them are scattered
about within these pages). The
fascinating thing about Borges was his ability to seamlessly meld the true and
the fantastical in his writing, and more than once I’ve tried to run down a
reference made in one of his pieces only to find that the source doesn’t exist,
or (to give the author the benefit of the doubt) is maddeningly elusive. I’m not sure there is much of that in these
lectures, but you never know.

Some of his assertions are charmingly antiquated, and there is no
topic that Borges could discuss that did not redefine the topic through his
lens – that is to say, Borges did not necessarily write of the Kabbalah as it
exists in the scholarly world (despite obligatory reference to Gershom Scholem),
but of the Borgesian Kabbalah. While one can certainly say this about any
author, Borges had created such a comprehensive and idiosyncratic metaphysical
world view that each of his preoccupations informed and redefined the others in
a holistic sense. For his readers,
Borges is as much defined by his literary worldview as Kafka is of his. It is as if his blindness, which – according
to the lecture here – progressed by degrees from birth, served to spur the
creation and growth of an interior universe, defined by the simultaneously
pedantic and imaginative mind of its creator.
In his lectures and writings, Borges gave us glimpses into that
universe. For the uninitiated, this
would be a good introduction, and a springboard to his other works.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

If, as Dr. Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of a
scoundrel, then HST had it in spades, for he stands to late 20th
century America as Baudelaire stood to the Church – a depraved lover, but a
lover just the same. The excesses in
this novelization of Raoul Duke’s wacky Vegas road trip are Rabelaisian in
their scope, and that surely must have been the point of it all: to exceed by a
wide margin the “extremes” of a Sin City born as an inevitable product of the
unique and soul-confining American Protestant ethic, and to shine the light
back upon the hypocrisies of the American Dream at the waning of the 1960’s.

It must be admitted that Thompson loved his country and
despaired of it – doing so until that despair attained terminal velocity under
the catastrophic administration of Bush the Lesser. I remember reading a piece from one of
Thompson’s later collections, and tasting that humorless hopelessness
permeating the pages. It was clear that
the good Doctor was not long for this world that he saw lunging headlong into a
shallow grave, a vision that the ascension of our newest (and most dangerous
yet) demagogue to power would appear to confirm.

We still have, however, this early and shining testament to
the man, his humor and his appetites, his keen insights made even through a
drug-addled lens. His was an expansive
awareness, which I believe was innate and not dependent upon any of his
numerous choices of artificial stimulation.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
is a rough and tumble read, with something to offend almost everyone. It is, as I said, a Rabelaisian work, and
if you get that (or even if you don’t), you can settle in and read it cover to
cover multiple times with no diminishment of the sheer gonzo glory of it.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Encompassing a missing-person mystery that isn’t much of a
mystery, this 1995 novel is nonetheless an entertaining and intelligent work
set amongst the surrealists of 1930’s London and Paris just before the Nazi
deluge. Irwin is as at ease in this milieu as he was in the world of medieval
Islam in The Arabian Nightmare (1983).

The protagonist is a minor painter with a Buster Keaton
profile who, in the course of a Dadaist prank, makes the acquaintance of a conventionally
attractive young English typist. Our
hero, Caspar, has a rather obscure (if not fictitious) background, littered
with innuendos of an extraordinary youth under the wing of a mysterious
guardian, and he seems to find young Caroline exotic in her ordinariness. The other members of Caspar’s surrealist
group, the Serapion Brotherhood (an Irwinesque name if there ever was one,
harkening back to E.T.A. Hoffmann and referencing a similarly named Russian
writers fraternity of the 20’s), are enjoying an extended adolescence, playing
games with irrationality as they play peek-a-boo with their individual
insecurities within the context of their grand surrealist gestures.

As the movement unwinds in the shadow of the approaching
Nazi darkness, the Brotherhood scatters to the wind following a very short and
dismally conceived orgy. Caroline
herself has suddenly disappeared, and in his search for her, Caspar’s obsession
grows. With the world tilting on its
axis, he desperately seeks the “normalcy” of a quiet dull life as a painter of
railway posters and Caroline, to his mind, is the key to this state of
existence that he now desperately craves.

Robert Irwin is a talented author who blends historical
personages (Dali, Breton, Paul Eluard, and a special appearance by Aleister
Crowley) into the narrative quite effectively and with good humor. Caroline’s disappearance isn’t much of a
mystery for even a half-attentive reader, although a red herring early on
suggesting that Caspar has somehow caused her demise has, by novel’s end,
vanished without a trace. While Caspar
seems to bumble through the story like a little lamb lost (the Keaton reference
seems to be an apt one), his adventures, acquaintances and sensations are quite
enough to make this an enjoyable read.

Friday, November 11, 2016

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

When my family relocated from Phoenix back to Austin in the spring
of 2014, the unbelievably competitive real estate market compelled us to lease
a home and put the vast majority of my library into storage. The plan was to rent for one year, but that
turned into almost two. As a lifelong
bibliophile, the absence of a library in the home was something I hadn’t
experienced for decades, and it would be mild to say that I didn’t take it
well. I had downscaled my collection by
a few hundred books before the move, and so I had something just approaching
9000 volumes in storage. I found room
for a small shelf in our temporary home, and here I kept a carefully selected
collection of items consisting mainly of my old Quartet Encounters softcovers,
New York Review Books editions, some of the more recent Penguin Classics, and a
variety of smallish volumes from Pushkin Press, Wakefield Press, and the
like.

While these books did keep me occupied in the rare quiet
moments as our family adjusted to new jobs, schools, etc., I would have to
confess that a mild depression set in, occasioned mainly by the absence of the
surrounding womb of books that I had grown to know and take comfort in. I devised some strategies to boost my mood
whenever I got too low. I could visit
some of the used bookstores in town, one of which was fairly close to our home,
I browsed Amazon for new titles, I read
from the wonderful volumes with which I had stocked the small shelf, and, most
therapeutic of all, I’d drive the short distance to the storage unit, that sad
monument to lives in transit, roll up the metal door, and sit perched on a
stepstool amidst the hundreds of cardboard boxes wherein my library was held in
suspended animation. I’d rummage
through a box at random, pick up some interesting and somewhat forgotten book
and spend an hour or two with it before the light grew dim and the heat of the
shed became too overwhelming.

It didn’t take long to unpack a few boxes onto the
bookshelves that were (obviously) also in storage. So now I had something to look at besides the
stacks of light brown boxes, even though I barely had room to place that little
stepstool. I kept a wary eye for vermin
(apart from the occasional black widow and some random crickets, my light
treatment of the space for insects seemed to work adequately) and any sign of
moisture. Although my trips to the unit
were far between, they did have a pleasant effect on my mood, and if by chance
whatever item I picked up was engaging enough (and most, frankly, were – I’m a
bibliophile, as I said) it came home with me for further perusal. This led to another, small bookcase in the
house where these refugees sat, along with the random new purchase.

I did gradually come to realize that, yes, I could exist in
a home without an overwhelming supply of books close at hand, although whether
I actually wanted to was another
question. Still, finally the day
came: after looking at and falling in
love with a succession of new homes, which we made generous offers on only to
have them shot down, sometimes in the most insulting manner (is there a lower
form of human being than a greedy homeseller in a ultra-hot market?), the right
place came our way in March, with an actual, honest to god human being willing to sell it for a generous - rather than an
obscene - profit. There were two
handsome rooms at the front of the house that would do nicely for a library,
even though a remarkable number of books would, by necessity, have to remain,
as they had in Phoenix, boxed in the garage.
Shelves were ordered, along with some decadent leather club chairs, a
nice rug, and a lovely copper hanging lamp.
The shelves were built over a long weekend while my family was
travelling, books began to be unpacked and sorted and, gradually, a library
took shape – the kind of place where you could soften the lighting, pour a nice
glass of wine (or better, Jameson’s), and spend an hour at the end of the day
in a quiet house. As Nero famously said:
“Now I can live like a human being!”

I mentioned above my Wakefield Press volumes. These are one of my more recent book enthusiasms,
a selection of surrealist, Dadaist, and decadent rarities long out of print –
or never before published – in English. During
my book exile, I scoured Amazon for these, greedily looking at forthcoming
publication dates. These are not the
sort of thing you will find in Barnes and Noble, and even Austin’s most
prestigious and eclectic independent bookstore, BookPeople, didn’t typically
keep a generous supply on hand. That changed a couple of weeks ago when my wife and I
visited Malvern Books on 28th
Street in Austin. A clean, well-ordered
shop, it stocks just about every small press that I’m interested in – even
Green Integer, the worthy successor to Sun and Moon Press. If you are a resident, or one of those
tourists who love to visit Austin for the humidity and the traffic, you should
do yourself a favor and stop by, say hello*, and buy something.

*The staff is actually friendly – at least they were on the
day I visited.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Recently read, there is little I can add to 50 Watts’
enthusiasm (here) for Goose of
Hermogenes, one of those discards found
in the dollar bin of my local bookstore, landing there because the casual
browser failed to see its worth, a diamond in the dung. Steeped in surreal and
occult imagery which seems to have come to Colquhoun as easily as breathing, it
is a deceptively short text which calls for re-readings, a characteristic it
shares with Gracq’s Chateau d’Argol and
Kubin’s The Other Side (another work
by a predominantly visual artist).

This is the relation of a young woman's trip to a dreamy and forbidding
coastal island, a transitional space between the worlds, ruled by the
narrator’s uncle. The uncle being an elusive but omniscient presence, an occult
Prospero, the narrator is left to explore the secluded mansion and its
environs. There is a true sense of
isolation and menace, broken by visions (a sea-Amazon arising, with an ancient underwater
kingdom, from the waves; an arboreal bordello where her enslaved sisters
service spirits of the netherworld), a tableaux of Tarot imagery, wherein her
uncle has collected the symbols of the minor arcana, the “Museum of the
Mosaico-Hermetic Science of Things Above and Things Below”, and the occasional
presence of a mysterious anchorite who acts as her keeper and protector.

If your tastes run to the occult or surreal, watch the
dollar bins for this little masterpiece, or order your own from a semi-reputable
dealer.

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Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel
Paul Schreber. A 1903 first person
account of schizophrenia by a institutionalized German jurist, fascinating (if
tiresomely repetitive) in its description of paranoia and hallucinatory
obsession as Schreber describes the psychic assaults of supernatural beings
that are transforming him into a woman. The oppression by both his imaginings
and the asylum staff are palpable, giving a certain poignancy to the
writing. This memoir was influential on
Freud’s thinking, misguided as it was (Freud never bothered to meet with the
author in person, although such a meeting would not likely have been too
difficult to arrange). The New York Review Books edition includes
introductions, appendices and notes relating to Schreber’s case.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. A
volume in the Millenium/Gollancz “Fantasy Masterworks” series, a novel of
Faerie written in 1926 the protagonist of which, Nathaniel Chanticleer, may
well put you in mind of another who puts comfort aside for the necessity of
adventure, Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End. One may also be put in mind of John
Crowley’s enchanting 1981 iteration of the theme, Little, Big.